Odd things happen in the confusion of war, or training for war, or even peacetime that resembles war. An example of the latter happened in 2010, when Nicaraguan commander Eden Pastora and his men accidentally invaded Costa Rica, supposedly because of a border error in Google Maps.

It's not clear why he decided to consult an Internet atlas instead of official military charts (which clearly depict the borders that both countries recognize). It's also not clear why it took him so long to figure out where he was. At one point, they took down a Costa Rican flag and replaced it with a Nicaraguan one, presumably because the flag wasn't represented by Google Maps so they assumed it had been erected by mistake. That's like walking into someone's house, throwing out all of their family photos to put up pictures of you and your grandparents, and then trying to tell the police that Mapquest is to blame for giving you shitty directions back to your apartment.

In Pastora's defense, the Google Maps view of the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica is off by about 3,000 meters (around a mile-and-a-half) in Nicaragua's favor. In Google's defense, their maps are meant to locate Burger Kings, not plan military patrol routes for rival South American nations.

But that's just one embarrassing story. Read the rest of it and five more at Cracked. Link -via Unreality

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When I was part of a team documenting the 50th Anniversary of D-Day, we got some great stories from the old veterans. One guy told me had a bead on a German soldier who walked out behind a building. He was all alone and made a perfect target. But when the German soldier lowered his trousers to answer the call of nature, the US veteran decided not to shoot him because "you just don't shoot a guy who's taking a dump. That's not fair."